> Thanks, I was hoping someone would post this typical elitist BS. Your attitude > is that users who aren't tech-savvy enough to prevent things like this from > happening deserve to suffer
Please don't take away my driver's licence, Your Honour. I know that I've run over 10 people in the past month, creating several widows and orphans. But you see, Your Honour, I'm a car user who isn't tech-savvy enough to prevent things like this from happening. I don't deserve to suffer.
> I am paying for X MBps download and Y MBps upload (it is dedicated).
No F***ing way a residential line is dedicated. It's "best effort" on an oversold connection. You want "X MBps download and Y MBps upload" guaranteed with an SLA, go for it. Just don't come back here whining about the several hundred dollars a month you'll have to pay for a business line.
Speaking of Toronto, Teksavvy provides ADSL up to 5 megabits, with 2 options
Unlimited (yes really) for $39.95/month for peering via Cogent
Premium for $29.95/month for peering via Peer1, with 200 gigs/month, and excess usage at 25 cents/gig
Ping times are 5 to 10 ms faster on Premium
Your choice.
I normally use under 5 gigs/month. If their basic DSL (actually SDSL) was 512 down / 288 up rather than 288 down / 288 up, I'd switch over to that. Even with the 10 gig cap I'd be comfortable.
> * Windows CAN be secured very well, with a bit of effort, for years of security, even online, > for years into the distance if you try what's in that URL above!
There are linux distros with shorter install documentation than that. Wouldn't it be better to use an operating system that did *NOT*, by default, autoexecute autorun files on every Sony CD and every USB key and every external USB drive and every USB digital picture frame immediately upon connection???
And while we're at it, why is it that... - in linux, I set up USB mass storage drivers *ONCE* in the kernel, and all USB keys and external drives just work, whereas - in Windows, every USB key from every different manufacturer requires me to download and install a driver from the internet in order to access the USB key???
> In both cases, IPv6 supports auto-registration so you won't have to fiddle with > it anyway. As the IETF says "Since IPv6 addresses are too long to remember and > EUI64-based addresses are too complicated to remember, they are not suitable for > such identifiers"
I have a main linux machine (which I call "m3000") and a newer machine as a hot backup ("d530"). In/etc/hosts, m3000 has IP address 192.168.123.252 and d530 has IP address 192.168.123.251. Those numbers are set up, and I can scp backups from 1 machine to the other, using the names "m3000" and "d530". I even have d530 set up to treat m3000 as its main Gentoo mirror, to lighten the overall load on the real Gentoo mirrors. It seems to me that if I let the machines pull IP addresses out of their rear ends with "autoconfiguration", I'm going to have a much harder time. Even under IPV6, I would still be better off using static IP addresses in/etc/hosts.
> If you have IPv6, you'll still have the router. I hope that all router > manufacturers will be shipping them with incoming connectivity disabled by > default, just like it is at the moment.
Given the security fiasco of wireless routers, I don't think you can safely assume that. I also find that it's getting difficult to find a wired router anymore, but that's another rant.
> You will have the benefit of being able to "DMZ" as many of your PCs as you like, > not just one of them. This is best of both worlds.
And how many Joe Lunchbucket home users do you know of that... - have several PCs? - *NEED* to DMZ several PCs? - know WTF a DMZ'd PC is in the first place?
> Any of users in the second group has to DECIDE on the distro. And decision on the > consumer side equals competition on the producer side.
> The way I see it (I am a windows user, but I must say I am VERY dissapointed in > their latest/greatest product) too much competition, forking etc. hurts linux > adoption and only helps MS: "Devide an conquer".
> Here's why: > - there are only so many developers (who are willing to give there IP away for free). > - there are many issues that needs to be solved / projects to complete > - if two teams decide to provide two solutions, the end users will have to wait for a > feature complete product almost twice as long
> Do we need KDE and Gnome?
Of course I assume you have no problems choosing between - Windows Vista Home Basic - Windows Vista Home Premium - Windows Vista Business - Windows Vista Enterprise - Windows Vista Ultimate - Windows Server 2003
> What's next? Is Germany going to "copyright" the swastika, so they can cash in on WW-II flicks?
Don't laugh. The German State of Bavaria has copyrighted Mein Kampf, and their permission is required to publish new copies. But of course Bavaria won't allow any publishing of it. This is actually a novel way of banning a book. See the Wikipedia article.
1)The biggest road-hog remains spam (unsolicited e-mail), which accounts for 90% of traffic on the internet.
Spam does *NOT* constitute 90% of all internet traffic. It constitutes 90% of all emails. At 10-to-15 kbytes each, they're not exactly overwhelming the internet. I should also point out that an email with multiple recipients at the same ISP goes as one email, and is exploded into multiple copies at the receiving ISP. This reduces the internet traffic even more. The biggest single traffic use is bittorrent and friends. Streaming video and legit online/download sales of movies might challenge it in future.
2) Soon, portable media-players, personal navigators, digital cameras, DVD players, flat-panel TV sets, and even mobile phones won't be able to function properly without access to the internet.
OMFG, NNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! The only way you'll see that is if linux is outlawed, and DRM-crippled computers/mediaplayers won't function without a live connection to the mothership.
3) Apple's initial response was to attempt a heavy-handed crackdown. But then a court decision in Germany forced its local carrier to unlock all iPhones sold there. Good news for iPhone owners everywhere: a flood of third-party applications is now underway.
4)The trend toward openness has been given added impetus by the recent collapse of the legal battles brought by SCO, a software developer. Formerly known as Santa Cruz Operations, the firm bought the Unix operating system and core technology in 1995 from Novell (which, in turn, had bought it from its original developer, AT&T).
Dear Economist, please hire Dan Lyons. He's a helluva lot more knowledgable about the SCOX case than you are. Sad, isn't it? Santa Cruz Operations sold their Unix distribution business to Caldera, who later renamed themselves The SCO Group and started trying to shake down linux users.
5)Pressured by worried customers fearing prosecution, a handful of Linux distributors settled with SCO just to stay in business.
NO. A handful of firms that use linux in their business signed SCOSource licences. None of these firms were linux distributors. The reporter might be confusing the SCOSource licence, with Microsoft's FUD licence, which a few distributors actually have signed.
And fer-cryin-out-loud, please knock off this bit about "The Year Of The Linux Desktop". Linux is growing slowly, relative to the overall market. It will overtake Apple, and eventually Windows. But it will be a long slow grind. What might happen is that one year people will stop counting sales (obviously $0 even for millions of free copies) and start counting desktops. Much to the establishment's surprise, they'll discover that there's a helluva lot more linux desktops than they expected.
Bundled cable channels force people to pay for channels that they don't want, in order to get the few channels they do want. Under the a la carte system, people pay only for what they're interested in, and the low-interest channels die a natural death.
Newspapers bundle local news, national news, world news, sports, stock market info, classified ads, comics, crossword puzzles, etc, etc. They charge a humoungous markup on their classified ads, and use that excess revenue to pay for reporters.
If I'm only interested in sports in general, I can go to a sports site. If I'm interested in world news, I can go to a zillion web sites. For comics, try Dilbert.com, for classified try Craigslist, etc, etc. Note that Craigslist is not supporting a bunch of investigative reporters, and unionized pressmen pull down humoungous wages, thanks to fat-cat union contracts. It does take a few salaries for techies, and servers, and bandwidth, but with a free db (MySQL or PostgreSQL) you can set up a classified service for a much lower cost than how a newspaper does it.
Just like low-interest channels die when not forcibly bundled with popular channels, so too will investigative reporting die when not forcibly bundled with moneymaking services like classifieds an full-page ads for cars or computers. However, when a newspaper's existance depends on fullpage ads from car manufacturers, do you really expect muck-raking exposes about unsafe or easy-to-steal cars? That is on aspect where citizen-bloggers are better than staff reporters. Their articles can't be threatened by an advertiser pulling its ads. Yes, SLAPP suits are possible, but they can backfire with Streisand-effect backlash.
> The more professional Flash websites will be quicker to address this vulnerability,
> whereas the ones that have been thrown together will make for bigger targets. Maybe this
> will motivate employers to hire Flash devs who really know what they're doing. After all,
> with Flash's scripting capabilities, developing in it for a client should be a serious
> matter based on trust.
WRONG; do NOT trust ANY web site.
So the "good guys" clean up their *.swf files. *WHAT ABOUT THE BAD GUYS*??? And please don't feed me that "don't go to untrustworthy websites" crap.
- Can you claim that you've never ever mistyped a URL and landed on a typosquatter's site?
- Are you sure that your ISP's DNS-server is 100% immune to cache-corruption? With pharming attacks, *EVEN IF YOU TYPE IN THE URL EXACTLY CORRECT* you will still get diverted to a malicious site.
- Do you only visit websites that don't have any 3rd-party banner ads? One of the current favourite attack methods is to insert malicious code in ad-servers that many mainstream sites use.
- Can you be absolutely certain that your favourite "trusted website" won't be compromised like the Superbowl teams' websites in Jan/Feb of 2007?
Almost exactly 2 years ago, MS WIndows was hit with the WMF exploit. They got a lot of flack when they said they wouldn't send out a fix until "Patch Tuesday". So they sent out quick fix before "Patch Tuesday". Meanwhile, Adobe isn't merely saying they'll have a patch out 2 weeks from this coming Tuesday. It's more like "no patch in site". I didn't give MS a free pass on the WMF vulnerability, and I don't think Adobe deserves any slack here. Another reason I'm more concerned is because my home PC, running linux was immune to the WMF vulnerability, but is subject to the Schlockwave Trash vulnerability.
ACID2 fits in perfectly with the Microsoft Mindset. Remember how MS screwed other browsers. They...
1) custom coded their HTML generators (e.g. Frontpage) to generate badly broken webpages, which any sane browser (Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, etc) would have problems with
2) custom coded IE to handled the badly broken webpages produced by Frontpage, etc.
The net result was a World Wide Web full of pages that are "best viewed with Internet Explorer". Embracing broken "MS Extensions" is wrong. Yet the people behind ACID2 seem to think that it's a good idea that a web browser should take a badly broken webpage and guess at what the "intent" of the webpage is. What's next? A C compiler that tries to guess what you intended your program to do, rather than returning a compiler error when it encounters broken C code? The solution to broken webpages should be to fix the broken webpages.
There's a saying that he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it. Every so often for the past couple of hundred years, some nutcase has come out of the woodwork, claiming "free energy" and "perpetual motion". This is all contrary to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, but the "inventors" seem to miss that.
In the mid-to-late-1990's Java was the OS-on-top-of-the-OS that was going to make the underlying OS totally irrelavant when you wanted to run an app. How many Java web applets do you regularly use today?
Later on, AOL decided that they were going to re-write Netscape 5 as an OS-on-top-of-the-OS that was going to make the underlying OS totally irrelavant when you wanted to run an app. Everybody remember what a roaring success that wasn't? It was the total neglect of the browser, whilst concentrating on the web-app-platform, that killed Netscape, moreso than Microsoft's dirty tactics.
However, like moths drawn to a flame, developers keep trying to change the browser into an OS-on-top-of-the-OS that's going to make the underlying OS totally irrelavant when want to run an app. Along comes Google, thinking they can do the impossible.
The perpetual-motion-machine nutcases run afoul of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The browser-based-web-application fanatics seem not to have heard of SARBOX and HIPAA, and equivalent laws outside the USA.
Your Aunt Ethel may use GMail. A university that doesn't want to provide email infrastructure for 15,000 students may use GMail. Any confidential business data, including that same university's HR data, damn well better not be floating around "in the cloud". Web-based computing is out of the question for a lot of corporations and governments, i.e. Microsoft's main customers. And then remember that the average person has a lot of stuff that
Web-apps have other problems...
- How many web-based spreadsheets or word processors have the power of Gnumeric or AbiWord, let alone MS Excel or MS Word?
- You download a browser-based-app, close your browser, and the app disappears, needing to be downloaded again, next time you want to use it. On Gentoo linux, I "emerge gnumeric" (apt-get for you Debian types), and the spreadsheet app hangs around until such time as I order the machine to delete it.
Music-DRM protects the RIAA's data and tries to prevent end-users from derivinging an unprotected version of the data in the file.
Personal-data-DRM (anonymization) protects the ISP's or hospital's data and tries to prevent end-users (researchers) from deriving an unprotected (unanonymized) version of the data in the file.
Music-DRM makes things more difficult for legitimate customers who legally purchased the data files (music).
Personal-data-DRM (anonymization) makes things more difficult for legitimate researchers who legally obtained the data files.
Music-DRM has always been defeated.
Personal-data-DRM (anonymization) will always be defeated.
We can't have our cake and eat it too. You either have usable data for researchers, or else you have privacy for people. It also occurs to me that data-mining technologies can be applied to breaking music-DRM in the same manner as they can be applied to breaking personal-data-DRM.
SGML (the ancestor of HTML) is a *MARKUP LANGUAGE* (the "ML" in "SGML"). HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It was originally written for text terminals of different widths. The original HTML pages never assumed that everybody had an identical screen. Early HTML only tried to control *GROUPING* of text (breaks, lists, etc). It assumed that *YOUR* browser would wrap the text to fit *YOUR* screen. It was *NOT* intended for "This page is best viewed with IE 3.1415926 on an 800x600 display with at least 32 colour display".
Then along came the "layout" freaks. This one is dedicated to all those "modern electronic media" who can't seem to throw off the shackles of Gutenburg. You know who you are...
Attention all
anal-retentive
control-freak,
layout editor
refugees from
19th century
newspapers. The
web is *NOT*,
repeat, *NOT* a
newspaper. A
PC monitor is
wider than it's
tall. Standard
newspaper-type
column format
totally sucks
when viewed on
PC monitors.
I use 1920X1280
display and get
1/6th of screen
for left panel,
1/6th for the
actual printed
column, 1/6th
for the right
panel. *THE
ENTIRE RIGHT
HALF OF THE
SCREEN IS 100%
BLANK*.
And of course
I then have to
scroll, scroll,
scroll to read
an item that
should easily
fit onto one
screen.
Disclaimer; this is my very rarely updated blog. Here's
a piece I did a while ago on this phenomenon. Start with the obvious, no piece of music is going to satisfy everybody. You can take any successful song, and 90% of people will hate it... but it'll be *A DIFFERENT 90% FOR EACH RECORD*. The only way to successfully cater to this situation is "the single", which allows people to buy songs they like, without getting a dozen pieces of crap bundled in. The heyday of the music industry was the 60's and 70's, when the 45 was king. When the single was killed by the CD, the music industry started its long decline.
WTF is a "cover version" SUPPOSED to sound like? As long as they got appropriate permisiions under contract, Activision shouldn't be subjected this crap.
If this crap was in effect in the 1950's and 1960's, Chubby Checker would never have gotten anywhere with his cover of a Hank Ballard and the Midnighters B-side called "The Twist". I'm an oldies afficianado, and I have a hard time telling the two records apart. The average person could listen to the two versions, and not know which was which.
No sympathy here. Cory, you should be yelling and screaming at the fuckwit of a video-game programmer that programmed the video-game to run a port-scan of the local network. How is the admin supposed to tell an "evil port scan" apart from a "benign port scan"? Btw, don't walk into a bank wearing a mask. A teller will push the button that silently alerts the local police station, and you'll spend the next 24 hours trying to raise bail.
If it quacks like a duck and it flies like a duck it's damn well going to be shot at each time it flies past a duck hunter.
> We will see how things will work out, but if blogs may serve as a comparison; > Being a form of independent journalism: I guess 95% is crap but people are > still able to find respectable blogs and filter out the bad stuff.
> Maybe the device should have a movable weight in it that would move in one > direction as you make progress in your book, shifting the devices COG/balance.
Look at the scrollbar on the right-hand of your screen as you're reading Slashdot. Isn't that enough?
...they'll simply stop re-authorizing copies of XP. WGA will occasionally demand to call home, and will shut down Windows if it can't connect, or if it connects and doesn't get permission from Steve.
Linux with a GUI desktop like GNOME or KDE is a resource hog, just like Vista with Aero. In linux, you have the option of running in console mode without a GUI. In Windows, you do not have the option to run without the GUI. For a bunch of file servers that don't have any monitors attached, a GUI is a pointless waste of resources. The best Microsoft OS for this would be DOS 5 or 6, and apps written to use DOS-4G DPMI (DOS Protected Mode Interface). Runs in 32-bit mode, can address oodles of memory, and doesn't need a GUI. Yes, I *AM* serious.
> Indeed, and likened the process to drug dealing: "They'll get sort of addicted, and then > we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." -- Bill Gates
Showing my age a bit... I remember a time back in the late 1980's and early 1990's whenever you bought a mouse or a hard drive, you got a *FREE AND LEGAL* copy of Windows 2 thrown in. The main reason was to enable people to run Excel. This was sorta like the late 70's and early 80's when MicroPro sold a subsidized low-price Z80 "Star Card" plus CP/M to enable the Apple ][ to run MicroPro's "Star Office" (no not Lotus' product). How many of you heard of... - the spreadsheet "CalcStar" (what???) - the flatfile databse "DataStar" (what???) - the word processor "WordStar" (whole bunch of hands go up)
> It's not so much to do with Japan being more gadget oriented or having better > Phones. People in Japan just use their phones for web browsing and email > because it's cheaper and more convenient.
Japanese make more use of "smart cellphones" because the cellphone manufacturers build cellphone keyboards appropriate for the hands of a 5-foot Oriental, rather than a 6-foot Caucasian. My cellphone is a Nokia 6015i "candy bar", and I hope it lasts for a long while. Some of the new cellphones on the market I could only use by... - laying them on a table - viewing it through a large "Sherlock Holmes" magnifying glass - use a sewing needle to press the keys to dial a phone number
There is a point beyond which miniturization is *NOT* what I want.
Slashdot Mirror
> Thanks, I was hoping someone would post this typical elitist BS. Your attitude
> is that users who aren't tech-savvy enough to prevent things like this from
> happening deserve to suffer
Please don't take away my driver's licence, Your Honour. I know that I've run over 10 people in the past month, creating several widows and orphans. But you see, Your Honour, I'm a car user who isn't tech-savvy enough to prevent things like this from happening. I don't deserve to suffer.
> I am paying for X MBps download and Y MBps upload (it is dedicated).
No F***ing way a residential line is dedicated. It's "best effort" on an oversold connection. You want "X MBps download and Y MBps upload" guaranteed with an SLA, go for it. Just don't come back here whining about the several hundred dollars a month you'll have to pay for a business line.
Speaking of Toronto, Teksavvy provides ADSL up to 5 megabits, with 2 options
Unlimited (yes really) for $39.95/month for peering via Cogent
Premium for $29.95/month for peering via Peer1, with 200 gigs/month, and excess usage at 25 cents/gig
Ping times are 5 to 10 ms faster on Premium
Your choice.
I normally use under 5 gigs/month. If their basic DSL (actually SDSL) was 512 down / 288 up rather than 288 down / 288 up, I'd switch over to that. Even with the 10 gig cap I'd be comfortable.
> HOW TO SECURE Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 & even VISTA + make it "fun" to do:
:)
> http://www.security-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=50567&sid=c8b24a76a3974ec9bef2bed38c4b64d4 [security-forums.com]
> * Windows CAN be secured very well, with a bit of effort, for years of security, even online,
> for years into the distance if you try what's in that URL above!
There are linux distros with shorter install documentation than that. Wouldn't it be better to use an operating system that did *NOT*, by default, autoexecute autorun files on every Sony CD and every USB key and every external USB drive and every USB digital picture frame immediately upon connection???
And while we're at it, why is it that...
- in linux, I set up USB mass storage drivers *ONCE* in the kernel, and all USB keys and external drives just work, whereas
- in Windows, every USB key from every different manufacturer requires me to download and install a driver from the internet in order to access the USB key???
A few questions
/etc/hosts, m3000 has IP address 192.168.123.252 and d530 has IP address 192.168.123.251. Those numbers are set up, and I can scp backups from 1 machine to the other, using the names "m3000" and "d530". I even have d530 set up to treat m3000 as its main Gentoo mirror, to lighten the overall load on the real Gentoo mirrors. It seems to me that if I let the machines pull IP addresses out of their rear ends with "autoconfiguration", I'm going to have a much harder time. Even under IPV6, I would still be better off using static IP addresses in /etc/hosts.
> In both cases, IPv6 supports auto-registration so you won't have to fiddle with
> it anyway. As the IETF says "Since IPv6 addresses are too long to remember and
> EUI64-based addresses are too complicated to remember, they are not suitable for
> such identifiers"
I have a main linux machine (which I call "m3000") and a newer machine as a hot backup ("d530"). In
> If you have IPv6, you'll still have the router. I hope that all router
> manufacturers will be shipping them with incoming connectivity disabled by
> default, just like it is at the moment.
Given the security fiasco of wireless routers, I don't think you can safely assume that. I also find that it's getting difficult to find a wired router anymore, but that's another rant.
> You will have the benefit of being able to "DMZ" as many of your PCs as you like,
> not just one of them. This is best of both worlds.
And how many Joe Lunchbucket home users do you know of that...
- have several PCs?
- *NEED* to DMZ several PCs?
- know WTF a DMZ'd PC is in the first place?
> Any of users in the second group has to DECIDE on the distro. And decision on the
> consumer side equals competition on the producer side.
> The way I see it (I am a windows user, but I must say I am VERY dissapointed in
> their latest/greatest product) too much competition, forking etc. hurts linux
> adoption and only helps MS: "Devide an conquer".
> Here's why:
> - there are only so many developers (who are willing to give there IP away for free).
> - there are many issues that needs to be solved / projects to complete
> - if two teams decide to provide two solutions, the end users will have to wait for a
> feature complete product almost twice as long
> Do we need KDE and Gnome?
Of course I assume you have no problems choosing between
- Windows Vista Home Basic
- Windows Vista Home Premium
- Windows Vista Business
- Windows Vista Enterprise
- Windows Vista Ultimate
- Windows Server 2003
Question: Mr. Ghandi, what do you think of Microsoft security?
Answer: I think it would be a good idea.
> What's next? Is Germany going to "copyright" the swastika, so they can cash in on WW-II flicks?
Don't laugh. The German State of Bavaria has copyrighted Mein Kampf, and their permission is required to publish new copies. But of course Bavaria won't allow any publishing of it. This is actually a novel way of banning a book. See the Wikipedia article.
1)The biggest road-hog remains spam (unsolicited e-mail), which accounts for 90% of traffic on the internet.
Spam does *NOT* constitute 90% of all internet traffic. It constitutes 90% of all emails. At 10-to-15 kbytes each, they're not exactly overwhelming the internet. I should also point out that an email with multiple recipients at the same ISP goes as one email, and is exploded into multiple copies at the receiving ISP. This reduces the internet traffic even more. The biggest single traffic use is bittorrent and friends. Streaming video and legit online/download sales of movies might challenge it in future.
2) Soon, portable media-players, personal navigators, digital cameras, DVD players, flat-panel TV sets, and even mobile phones won't be able to function properly without access to the internet.
OMFG, NNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! The only way you'll see that is if linux is outlawed, and DRM-crippled computers/mediaplayers won't function without a live connection to the mothership.
3) Apple's initial response was to attempt a heavy-handed crackdown. But then a court decision in Germany forced its local carrier to unlock all iPhones sold there. Good news for iPhone owners everywhere: a flood of third-party applications is now underway.
The decision was overturned on appeal three weeks ago.
4)The trend toward openness has been given added impetus by the recent collapse of the legal battles brought by SCO, a software developer. Formerly known as Santa Cruz Operations, the firm bought the Unix operating system and core technology in 1995 from Novell (which, in turn, had bought it from its original developer, AT&T).
Dear Economist, please hire Dan Lyons. He's a helluva lot more knowledgable about the SCOX case than you are. Sad, isn't it? Santa Cruz Operations sold their Unix distribution business to Caldera, who later renamed themselves The SCO Group and started trying to shake down linux users.
5)Pressured by worried customers fearing prosecution, a handful of Linux distributors settled with SCO just to stay in business.
NO. A handful of firms that use linux in their business signed SCOSource licences. None of these firms were linux distributors. The reporter might be confusing the SCOSource licence, with Microsoft's FUD licence, which a few distributors actually have signed.
And fer-cryin-out-loud, please knock off this bit about "The Year Of The Linux Desktop". Linux is growing slowly, relative to the overall market. It will overtake Apple, and eventually Windows. But it will be a long slow grind. What might happen is that one year people will stop counting sales (obviously $0 even for millions of free copies) and start counting desktops. Much to the establishment's surprise, they'll discover that there's a helluva lot more linux desktops than they expected.
...and websites == a la carte
Bundled cable channels force people to pay for channels that they don't want, in order to get the few channels they do want. Under the a la carte system, people pay only for what they're interested in, and the low-interest channels die a natural death.
Newspapers bundle local news, national news, world news, sports, stock market info, classified ads, comics, crossword puzzles, etc, etc. They charge a humoungous markup on their classified ads, and use that excess revenue to pay for reporters.
If I'm only interested in sports in general, I can go to a sports site. If I'm interested in world news, I can go to a zillion web sites. For comics, try Dilbert.com, for classified try Craigslist, etc, etc. Note that Craigslist is not supporting a bunch of investigative reporters, and unionized pressmen pull down humoungous wages, thanks to fat-cat union contracts. It does take a few salaries for techies, and servers, and bandwidth, but with a free db (MySQL or PostgreSQL) you can set up a classified service for a much lower cost than how a newspaper does it.
Just like low-interest channels die when not forcibly bundled with popular channels, so too will investigative reporting die when not forcibly bundled with moneymaking services like classifieds an full-page ads for cars or computers. However, when a newspaper's existance depends on fullpage ads from car manufacturers, do you really expect muck-raking exposes about unsafe or easy-to-steal cars? That is on aspect where citizen-bloggers are better than staff reporters. Their articles can't be threatened by an advertiser pulling its ads. Yes, SLAPP suits are possible, but they can backfire with Streisand-effect backlash.
> The more professional Flash websites will be quicker to address this vulnerability,
> whereas the ones that have been thrown together will make for bigger targets. Maybe this
> will motivate employers to hire Flash devs who really know what they're doing. After all,
> with Flash's scripting capabilities, developing in it for a client should be a serious
> matter based on trust.
WRONG; do NOT trust ANY web site.
So the "good guys" clean up their *.swf files. *WHAT ABOUT THE BAD GUYS*??? And please don't feed me that "don't go to untrustworthy websites" crap.
- Can you claim that you've never ever mistyped a URL and landed on a typosquatter's site?
- Are you sure that your ISP's DNS-server is 100% immune to cache-corruption? With pharming attacks, *EVEN IF YOU TYPE IN THE URL EXACTLY CORRECT* you will still get diverted to a malicious site.
- Do you only visit websites that don't have any 3rd-party banner ads? One of the current favourite attack methods is to insert malicious code in ad-servers that many mainstream sites use.
- Can you be absolutely certain that your favourite "trusted website" won't be compromised like the Superbowl teams' websites in Jan/Feb of 2007?
Almost exactly 2 years ago, MS WIndows was hit with the WMF exploit. They got a lot of flack when they said they wouldn't send out a fix until "Patch Tuesday". So they sent out quick fix before "Patch Tuesday". Meanwhile, Adobe isn't merely saying they'll have a patch out 2 weeks from this coming Tuesday. It's more like "no patch in site". I didn't give MS a free pass on the WMF vulnerability, and I don't think Adobe deserves any slack here. Another reason I'm more concerned is because my home PC, running linux was immune to the WMF vulnerability, but is subject to the Schlockwave Trash vulnerability.
DIE SCHLOCKWAVE TRASH, DIE.
ACID2 fits in perfectly with the Microsoft Mindset. Remember how MS screwed other browsers. They...
1) custom coded their HTML generators (e.g. Frontpage) to generate badly broken webpages, which any sane browser (Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, etc) would have problems with
2) custom coded IE to handled the badly broken webpages produced by Frontpage, etc.
The net result was a World Wide Web full of pages that are "best viewed with Internet Explorer". Embracing broken "MS Extensions" is wrong. Yet the people behind ACID2 seem to think that it's a good idea that a web browser should take a badly broken webpage and guess at what the "intent" of the webpage is. What's next? A C compiler that tries to guess what you intended your program to do, rather than returning a compiler error when it encounters broken C code? The solution to broken webpages should be to fix the broken webpages.
or at least the option. That includes escaping "+" and "-". That would do sooooo much to improve searches.
There's a saying that he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it. Every so often for the past couple of hundred years, some nutcase has come out of the woodwork, claiming "free energy" and "perpetual motion". This is all contrary to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, but the "inventors" seem to miss that.
In the mid-to-late-1990's Java was the OS-on-top-of-the-OS that was going to make the underlying OS totally irrelavant when you wanted to run an app. How many Java web applets do you regularly use today?
Later on, AOL decided that they were going to re-write Netscape 5 as an OS-on-top-of-the-OS that was going to make the underlying OS totally irrelavant when you wanted to run an app. Everybody remember what a roaring success that wasn't? It was the total neglect of the browser, whilst concentrating on the web-app-platform, that killed Netscape, moreso than Microsoft's dirty tactics.
However, like moths drawn to a flame, developers keep trying to change the browser into an OS-on-top-of-the-OS that's going to make the underlying OS totally irrelavant when want to run an app. Along comes Google, thinking they can do the impossible.
The perpetual-motion-machine nutcases run afoul of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The browser-based-web-application fanatics seem not to have heard of SARBOX and HIPAA, and equivalent laws outside the USA.
Your Aunt Ethel may use GMail. A university that doesn't want to provide email infrastructure for 15,000 students may use GMail. Any confidential business data, including that same university's HR data, damn well better not be floating around "in the cloud". Web-based computing is out of the question for a lot of corporations and governments, i.e. Microsoft's main customers. And then remember that the average person has a lot of stuff that
Web-apps have other problems...
- How many web-based spreadsheets or word processors have the power of Gnumeric or AbiWord, let alone MS Excel or MS Word?
- You download a browser-based-app, close your browser, and the app disappears, needing to be downloaded again, next time you want to use it. On Gentoo linux, I "emerge gnumeric" (apt-get for you Debian types), and the spreadsheet app hangs around until such time as I order the machine to delete it.
-
Music-DRM protects the RIAA's data and tries to prevent end-users from derivinging an unprotected version of the data in the file.
-
Music-DRM makes things more difficult for legitimate customers who legally purchased the data files (music).
-
Music-DRM has always been defeated.
We can't have our cake and eat it too. You either have usable data for researchers, or else you have privacy for people. It also occurs to me that data-mining technologies can be applied to breaking music-DRM in the same manner as they can be applied to breaking personal-data-DRM.Personal-data-DRM (anonymization) protects the ISP's or hospital's data and tries to prevent end-users (researchers) from deriving an unprotected (unanonymized) version of the data in the file.
Personal-data-DRM (anonymization) makes things more difficult for legitimate researchers who legally obtained the data files.
Personal-data-DRM (anonymization) will always be defeated.
SGML (the ancestor of HTML) is a *MARKUP LANGUAGE* (the "ML" in "SGML"). HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It was originally written for text terminals of different widths. The original HTML pages never assumed that everybody had an identical screen. Early HTML only tried to control *GROUPING* of text (breaks, lists, etc). It assumed that *YOUR* browser would wrap the text to fit *YOUR* screen. It was *NOT* intended for "This page is best viewed with IE 3.1415926 on an 800x600 display with at least 32 colour display".
Then along came the "layout" freaks. This one is dedicated to all those "modern electronic media" who can't seem to throw off the shackles of Gutenburg. You know who you are...
Attention all
anal-retentive
control-freak,
layout editor
refugees from
19th century
newspapers. The
web is *NOT*,
repeat, *NOT* a
newspaper. A
PC monitor is
wider than it's
tall. Standard
newspaper-type
column format
totally sucks
when viewed on
PC monitors.
I use 1920X1280
display and get
1/6th of screen
for left panel,
1/6th for the
actual printed
column, 1/6th
for the right
panel. *THE
ENTIRE RIGHT
HALF OF THE
SCREEN IS 100%
BLANK*.
And of course
I then have to
scroll, scroll,
scroll to read
an item that
should easily
fit onto one
screen.
Disclaimer; this is my very rarely updated blog. Here's a piece I did a while ago on this phenomenon. Start with the obvious, no piece of music is going to satisfy everybody. You can take any successful song, and 90% of people will hate it... but it'll be *A DIFFERENT 90% FOR EACH RECORD*. The only way to successfully cater to this situation is "the single", which allows people to buy songs they like, without getting a dozen pieces of crap bundled in. The heyday of the music industry was the 60's and 70's, when the 45 was king. When the single was killed by the CD, the music industry started its long decline.
Oh yeah, while you're at it *KNOCK OFF THE F'ing LOUDNESS AND COMPRESSION*.
WTF is a "cover version" SUPPOSED to sound like? As long as they got appropriate permisiions under contract, Activision shouldn't be subjected this crap.
If this crap was in effect in the 1950's and 1960's, Chubby Checker would never have gotten anywhere with his cover of a Hank Ballard and the Midnighters B-side called "The Twist". I'm an oldies afficianado, and I have a hard time telling the two records apart. The average person could listen to the two versions, and not know which was which.
No sympathy here. Cory, you should be yelling and screaming at the fuckwit of a video-game programmer that programmed the video-game to run a port-scan of the local network. How is the admin supposed to tell an "evil port scan" apart from a "benign port scan"? Btw, don't walk into a bank wearing a mask. A teller will push the button that silently alerts the local police station, and you'll spend the next 24 hours trying to raise bail.
If it quacks like a duck
and it flies like a duck
it's damn well going to be shot at each time it flies past a duck hunter.
> We will see how things will work out, but if blogs may serve as a comparison;
> Being a form of independent journalism: I guess 95% is crap but people are
> still able to find respectable blogs and filter out the bad stuff.
90% of *EVERYTHING* is crud.
Theodore Sturgeon, 1958
> Maybe the device should have a movable weight in it that would move in one
> direction as you make progress in your book, shifting the devices COG/balance.
Look at the scrollbar on the right-hand of your screen as you're reading Slashdot. Isn't that enough?
...they'll simply stop re-authorizing copies of XP. WGA will occasionally demand to call home, and will shut down Windows if it can't connect, or if it connects and doesn't get permission from Steve.
Linux with a GUI desktop like GNOME or KDE is a resource hog, just like Vista with Aero. In linux, you have the option of running in console mode without a GUI. In Windows, you do not have the option to run without the GUI. For a bunch of file servers that don't have any monitors attached, a GUI is a pointless waste of resources. The best Microsoft OS for this would be DOS 5 or 6, and apps written to use DOS-4G DPMI (DOS Protected Mode Interface). Runs in 32-bit mode, can address oodles of memory, and doesn't need a GUI. Yes, I *AM* serious.
> Indeed, and likened the process to drug dealing: "They'll get sort of addicted, and then
> we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." -- Bill Gates
Showing my age a bit... I remember a time back in the late 1980's and early 1990's whenever you bought a mouse or a hard drive, you got a *FREE AND LEGAL* copy of Windows 2 thrown in. The main reason was to enable people to run Excel. This was sorta like the late 70's and early 80's when MicroPro sold a subsidized low-price Z80 "Star Card" plus CP/M to enable the Apple ][ to run MicroPro's "Star Office" (no not Lotus' product). How many of you heard of...
- the spreadsheet "CalcStar" (what???)
- the flatfile databse "DataStar" (what???)
- the word processor "WordStar" (whole bunch of hands go up)
> It's not so much to do with Japan being more gadget oriented or having better
> Phones. People in Japan just use their phones for web browsing and email
> because it's cheaper and more convenient.
Japanese make more use of "smart cellphones" because the cellphone manufacturers build cellphone keyboards appropriate for the hands of a 5-foot Oriental, rather than a 6-foot Caucasian. My cellphone is a Nokia 6015i "candy bar", and I hope it lasts for a long while. Some of the new cellphones on the market I could only use by...
- laying them on a table
- viewing it through a large "Sherlock Holmes" magnifying glass
- use a sewing needle to press the keys to dial a phone number
There is a point beyond which miniturization is *NOT* what I want.